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Ever wanted to see where the mysterious G-man went when you saw him walk off-screen in Half-life, or whats behind mysterious doors in Fallout 4, or where Pyramid Head goes in Silent Hill 2, or how they do in-game mirrors?

Shesez has a Youtube series called Boundary Break. You might remember my previous post about Slippy Slides and his series Slippin Out, but I’ve found Shesez’s series to be much better and cover many more games.

Here’s some good ones to whet your appetite and show you all the crazy tricks developers use to make your favorite games:

Here’s a really fascinating animation and analysis of traffic flows with different intersection methodologies. More interesting is that they were done with off-the-shelf steam games/tools found on Steam. I think

Network Extensions 2
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=812125426

Traffic Manager: President Edition
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=583429740

Some interesting observations:

• 4 way intersections with lights (235 cars/min) is only slightly better than a no light free-for-all (191 car/min)
• Standard roundabouts with stops are really horrible, but get pretty interesting and good with a few simple improvements
• There’s a lot of interesting junction/interchange types I’ve never seen before

Appears the pressure is being recognized by Facebook? Facebook said it’s making major changes to shift users’ news feeds back toward posts from friends and family and away from businesses and media outlets

“By making these changes, I expect the time people spend on Facebook and some measures of engagement will go down,” Zuckerberg wrote. “But I also expect the time you do spend on Facebook will be more valuable. And if we do the right thing, I believe that will be good for our community and our business over the long term too.”

Article here

nVidia had some great reveals during CES this year. New mobile GPU’s for super-thin laptops, new Xavier SOC for autonomous driving, and major AI/machine learning platforms.

Definitely worth a watch

https://www.engadget.com/2018/01/08/everything-nvidia-unveiled-in-under-10-minutes/

Babycastles is a New York nonprofit that is a mish-mash of Maker, Indie developer, and art communities. They create interesting and unique art/gaming installations – such as this Pacman version that runs on all 5 surfaces of a room. Check out their other strange and quirky projects.

Videos of more social media site creators and executives speaking out directly against what they created. They call for each person to awaken to how they can ‘program’ you and that each person should make a conscious effort to limit their use of them. Here’s what Chamath Palihapitiya, former Facebook VP, has to say now:

“People need to hard break from these tools. The short-term dopamine driven feedback loops we have created are destroying how society works. No civil discourse, no cooperation, misinformation, mistrust. Bad actors can now manipulate large swaths of people to do anything they want. … You do not realize it, but you are now being programmed.”

Here’s from Sean Parker, former Facebook President:

“You’re exploiting a vulnerability of human psychology. The inventors, creators, understood this – consciously – and we did it anyway.”

I encourage you to go to TimeWellSpent and my previous article on this subject on how we can be aware of how these systems can be harmful to you emotional wellbeing and limit the more damaging influences of social media.